Abruptly I asked her to tell me about Old Pebble. She looked at me for a moment, as if wondering why I had asked, then quite cheerfully and openly she began to talk about the head tracker.

He was, she said, the strongest man she had ever seen. She said there had been times, when unexpected freshets had come, when he had hauled from sunup to sundown without stopping for so much as a cup of tea.

I asked what he worked so hard for.

“He works for work,” she said. “He loves the work for its own sake. He loves everything he does for its own sake—everything he does on the river, that is. When he is in a city he is a poor man, he is like a crippled beggar.”

Su-ling told me that Old Pebble knew boats better than most people knew people. He knew more about how junks were made than most junk-builders, and he was an exquisite wright himself and had helped to build and finish and found this craft we were on. I had noticed the wonderful details of this junk—the hardwood tholepins on the stem beam, for instance, which acted as oarlocks for the great bow sweep, and which looked like parts of a piece of rare furniture, with queer tiger heads, grotesque as gargoyles, fastened to their tops; yes, Su-ling said, Old Pebble had carved them one time at Fu-ping.

Then Old Pebble had been with this junk since before it was launched?

Oh, yes, he had been in her husband’s crew for many years. He was like an arm to the Old Big.

What sort of person was her husband?

“He thinks he is unlucky,” she said, and she added that he was inwardly virtuous and kind, but that misfortune had made him sarcastic and suspicious. He had had a number of accidents on the river, and once he had suffered the total loss of a junk, and no one could tell him that this was the way of the Great River—that every captain had frequent accidents. He thought his misfortune was something special, something designed for him.

I had seen for myself that the owner was a tall, hawk-like, tendinous man, with not much insulation on his wires, not the sort for jollity—apparently a dyspeptic with a talent for inflicting misfortune on himself and misery on his dear ones, a man who would charge high rates for his virtue and make his kindness felt as a sort of punishment.

I could not help asking Su-ling why she had married this man.

“My parents thought it best,” she said, and I saw the sweet serious tightness at the corner of her mouth.